Slavery was bad, though so was invading the South over them trying to form their own country. It's government of the people, by the people, for the people...except if the people want out, in which case it's just tough [inks].
I think I disagree. I've thought about this and gone back and forth, but I think Lincoln deserves to be recognized as a hero for "saving the union." Sure, the charge of tyranny was fair owing to the suspension of habeus corpus and martial law, but he certainly didn't deserve to be executed over that. In any case, if the Republicans in congress had lost the stomach for war after those first two losses at Bull Run, or if Lincoln hadn't pursued the war in the first place, this continent would have reverted to being an imperial European playground. The precedent for disunion would have been set. Others would have followed, and nothing was really holding the confederacy together except a common loathing for the Republicans, so basically there would be no great American nation. No counterbalance to the terrible ideologies and histories of Europe in the 20th century. Who knows how history would have unfolded? Likely, our lives would have been very different. My grandparents all migrated to this country in the early 20th century, but likely that would not have happened if there was no land of opportunity to which to migrate. We might all be running scared from German and Russian nukes right now in a bipolar fascist/communist world if the United States hadn't been preserved by Lincoln and the Republicans.
While I have nothing against the battle flag of the confederacy--or the swastikas that Hindus wear on their shirts and the many that adorn Buddhist temples in the Far East, or OC tattoo on California Penitentiary inmates, or the hammer and the sickle, or other symbols that seemed to have taken lives of their own in the minds of the people--I still think that the crushing of the rebellion, however legal it may have been, was very much in the best interests of the American people.
Eh, hindsight is 20/20. We can look back now and say that a strong United States made the difference in winning World War II or the Cold War. Along those lines, I see that you make the case that it would have permanently weakened the idea of the United States, but I wonder. The parts of the country that tended to attract the most immigrants at the time were still part of the union. Even if secession were seen as being more acceptable, this was by far the most divisive event in the country's history and it still took decades to reach a tipping point. I have my doubts as to how much losing the South would have actually affected the evolution of our country's history.
Slavery was bad, though so was invading the South over them trying to form their own country. It's government of the people, by the people, for the people...except if the people want out, in which case it's just tough [inks].
I don't recall any slaves having a say in whether a new country in which they'd be kept in perpetual servitude would be formed. Oh, right: of, by and for (61% of) the people.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the best argument to be made for the war happening. There are limits on what people can do in a democratic society, but there are also limits on what limits can be imposed. To me, limiting a change in associations that happens to be supported by the supermajority of the public because it is "treasonous" crosses all limits and is simply reprehensible. The issue at hand is that many people were deprived of their voice in the matter, meaning that there wouldn't have been a real supermajority in favor of the action.
The CSA was an interesting case of people acting for bad reasons, so it's tough for me to sympathize with them being stopped. There are other examples where I have no real reservation with supporting secessionist forces, such as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, &c. seceding from Serbia in the 1990s. Funny enough, I think many of the same folks decrying Southern secession as treason would have actually supported that one.
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